Friday, May 06, 2005

Sick and unloved

Source: Bloomberg

EuroTelco has underperformed the market by nearly 7% year-to-date, with an absolute return of -3.2%, making it far and away the worst of the 18 STOXX industry groups.

For those interested in technical analysis, here's a Bloomberg screenshot of a Fibonacci retracement graph of the STOXX Telecom sector (that's the benchmark we follow, for those not involved in these sorts of things).

What it shows is that, at the market open this morning, we were clinging precariously to a support level of 272.05, which we have subsequently breached. Next stop is at 266, and if that fails, it's back to the 255 area. The moving average trends and RSI (neither of which are pictured here) also look, well, pretty crap to be honest.

The contrarion view might be that with expectations so low, and such huge underperformance already, there's a mounting case for a rebound. I would argue that you can't call the bottom in an industry which is vulnerable to having its guts ripped out by a large cast of characters stretching from Bill Gates to the teenager next door (though admittedly someone like Bram Cohen was not your typical teenager). It should also be no comfort to the industry that the only period of significant outperformance since the meltdown was in the three months immediately following 9/11.

UPDATE: The US jobs data seems to have pulled our butts out of the fire for now...